Obama's Communist Mentor

February 25, 2008

In his biography of Barack Obama, David Mendell writes about Obama's life
as a "secret smoker" and how he "went to great lengths to conceal the habit."
But what about Obama's secret political life? It turns out that Obama's childhood
mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist.

In his books, Obama admits attending "socialist conferences" and coming into
contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a "hard-core
academic Marxist," which was made by his colorful and outspoken 2004 U.S.
Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.

However, through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship
with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party
USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where,
at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son,
with Davis, listening to his "poetry" and getting advice on his career path.
But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly
as just "Frank."

The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party
subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission
on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified
him as a CPUSA member. What's more, anti-communist congressional committees,
including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis
of involvement in several communist-front organizations.

Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand-based libertarian
activist, researcher and blogger, noted evidence that "Frank" was Frank Marshall
Davis in a
posting in March of 2007.

Obama's communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate
who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative
record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S.
presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average,
Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.

AIM recently
disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which
help explain why he sponsored a "Global
Poverty Act" designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S.
foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill
has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.

But the Communist Party connection through Davis is even more ominous. Decades
ago, the CPUSA had tens of thousands of members, some of them covert agents
who had penetrated the U.S. Government. It received secret subsidies from
the old Soviet Union.

You won't find any of this discussed in the David Mendell book, Obama: From
Promise to Power. It is typical of the superficial biographies of Obama
now on the market. Secret smoking seems to be Obama's most controversial activity.
At best, Mendell and the liberal media describe Obama as "left-leaning."

But you will find it briefly discussed, sort of, in Obama's own book, Dreams
From My Father. He writes about "a poet named Frank," who visited them
in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of "hard-earned knowledge" and advice.
Who was Frank? Obama only says that he had "some modest notoriety once," was
"a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in
Chicago..." but was now "pushing eighty." He writes about "Frank and his old
Black Power dashiki self" giving him advice before he left for Occidental
College in 1979 at the age of 18.

This "Frank" is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist
writer now considered by some to be in the same category of prominence as
Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003 issue
of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University
reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas,
about Davis's career, and notes, "In Davis's case, his political commitments
led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War
II-even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership." Tidwell is
an expert on the life and writings of Davis.

Is it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his book,
Dreams From My Father, first published in 1995? That's
not plausible since Obama refers to him as a contemporary of Richard
Wright and Langston Hughes and says he saw a book of his black poetry.

The communists knew who "Frank" was, and they know who Obama is. Let's challenge
the liberal media to report on this. Will they have the honesty and integrity
to do so?

Cliff Kincaid is the director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism. Cliff regularly appears on television and radio programs, including the CBS Evening News, NBC’s Today Show, Lou Dobbs Tonight, The Glenn Beck Show, Fox and Friends, The O’Reilly Factor, and more. He has co-authored several books, which you can purchase from the links below.